CareTech, Oakwood Rewrite The Book On Disaster Recovery

TROY (WWJ) — CareTech Solutions, an IT provider to the hospital industry, Thursday released a new white paper on a novel approach to disaster recovery from its customer, Dearborn-based Oakwood Healthcare.

The paper shares several technology advancements made by Oakwood Healthcare that enabled the healthcare provider to shift from a costly, cold-site disaster recovery model to a more efficient warm-site model.

“When you think about disaster recovery, it’s one of those areas usually down the priority list,” said Don Beyer, director of Technical Services for Oakwood Healthcare. “It’s viewed much like an insurance plan that you try to get good value for the amount of money you spend on it; hoping you never have to use it.”

Oakwood’s IT infrastructure is supported by CareTech Solutions, and together the two organizations challenged the conventional disaster recovery model as a program element in Oakwood’s implementation of its new electronic health record, Epic.

“Rather than thinking about disaster recovery as a separate, stand-alone requirement, we took a fresh look at it,” said Beyer. “We wanted to see if we could leverage our disaster recovery environment on a regular basis by using the available resources for maintenance, load balancing and relocation, rather than having resources sit idle until the world falls apart.”

To learn more about the financial and efficiency benefits achieved by Oakwood, read the white paper “Slashing Downtime from 24 Hours to 24 Minutes.”

Oakwood Healthcare is an independent, not-for-profit health care organization with four acute care hospitals and more than 50 outpatient centers, 9,000 employees and 1,300 doctors. Oakwood was a finalist for the 2011 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award.